Computer systems (i.e., CPU, memory and related electronics), networks (i.e., a system of computers interconnected by telephone wires or other means in order to share information) and data centers (i.e., a facility housing a large amount of electronic equipment) are exposed to a constant and differing variety of attacks that expose vulnerabilities of such systems in order to compromise their security and/or operation. As an example, various forms of malicious software program attacks include viruses, worms, Trojan horses and the like that computer systems can obtain over a network such as the Internet. Quite often, users of such computer systems are not even aware that such malicious programs have been obtained within the computer system. Once resident within a computer system, a malicious program that executes might disrupt operation of the computer system to a point of inoperability and/or might spread itself to other computer systems within a computer networking environment or data center by exploiting vulnerabilities of the computer system's operating system or resident application programs. Other malicious programs might operate within a computer system to secretly extract and transmit information within the computer system to remote computer systems for various suspect purposes. As an example, spyware is a form of software that can execute in the background (e.g., unbeknownst to users) of a computer system and can perform undesirable processing operations such as tracking, recording and transmitting user input from the spyware-resident computer system to a remote computer system. Spyware can allow remote computer systems to silently obtain otherwise confidential information such as usernames and passwords required to access protected data, lists, contents of files or even remote web sites user account information.
Computer system developers, software developers and security experts have created many types of conventional preventive measures that operate within conventional computer systems in an attempt to prevent operation of malicious programs from stealing information or from compromising proper operation of the computer systems. As an example, conventional virus detection software operates to periodically download a set of virus definitions from a remotely located server. Once the virus detection software obtains the definitions, the virus detection software can monitor incoming data received by the computer system, such as email messages containing attachments, to identify viruses defined within the virus definitions that might be present within the data accessed by the computer. Such data might be obtained over a network or might be unknowingly resident on a computer readable medium, such as a disk or CD-ROM that a user inserts into the computer. Upon detection of inbound data containing a virus or other malicious program, the virus detection software can quarantine the inbound data so that a user of the computer system will not execute code or access the data containing the detected virus that might result in compromising the computer's operation.
Other examples of conventional malicious attacks, intrusions, or undesirable processing that can cause problems within computer systems or even entire networks include virus attacks, worm attacks, trojan horse attacks, denial-of-service attacks, buffer overflow operations, execution of malformed application data, and execution of malicious mobile code. Virus attacks, worm attacks, and trojan horse attacks are variants of each other that generally involve the execution of a program, for which a user often is unaware of its existence, that performs some undesired processing operations to comprise a computer's proper operation. A denial-of-service attack operates to provide an intentional simultaneous barrage of packets (e.g., many connection attempts) emanating from many different computer systems to one or more target computer systems, such as a web site, in order to intentionally cause an overload in processing capabilities of the target computer system resulting in disruption of service or a business function provided by the target computer. Denial of Service attacks may also seek to crash the targeted computer system (rather than simply consume resources). Buffer overflow attacks occur when programs do not provide appropriate checks of data stored in internal data structures within the software that result in overwriting surrounding areas of memory. Attacks based on buffer overflows might allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the target system to invoke privileged access, destroy data, or perform other undesirable functions. Malformed application data attacks might result in an application containing a code section that, if executed, provides access to resources that would otherwise be private to the application. Such attacks can expose vulnerabilities due to an incorrect implementation of the application, for example by failing to provide appropriate data validity checks, or allowing data stream parsing errors, and the like.
Many of the conventional malicious programs and mechanisms for attack of computer systems, such as viruses and worms, include the ability to redistribute themselves to other computer systems or devices within a computer network, such that several computer systems become infected and experience the malicious processing activities discussed above. Some conventional attempts to prevent redistribution of malicious programs include implementing malicious program detection mechanisms such as virus detection software within firewalls (i.e., software that prevents unauthorized users from gaining access to a network) or gateways (i.e., software or hardware that enables communication between networks that use different communications protocols) between different portions of networked computer systems in order to halt propagation of malicious programs to sub-networks.